Manufacturers of mechanical equipment, food packagers, and other users of wax and grease for lubricating, sealing have a continuing need for wax and grease compositions. Manufacturing these waxes and greases is expensive due to the requirement of pricey petroleum feed in the manufacturing process.
It would be advantageous to employ readily available polyethylene waste and recycle them to produce waxes and greases at lower cost.
It would be advantageous to have a relatively inexpensive process for producing wax and grease base stock. Such a process would ideally employ a readily available inexpensive feedstock and use an inexpensive process. Waste plastics/polymers have been used in known processes for the manufacture of such products. Plastic waste is among the fastest growing solid waste and employing this solid waste to produce useful wax and grease addresses growing plastic disposal problems.
Further, the majority of the polymer/plastics waste may be polyethylene and due to its non-biodegradability, it has been accumulating in nature. Polyethylene waste in general is either land-filled or burnt-former leads to the loss of material and waste of land while the latter results in emission of green-house-gases; only a small proportion of entire plastic waste is currently being recycled as secondary polymers which have poor quality and give low financial returns.
In recent times, there have been considerable efforts to convert these polymeric solid wastes into useful products such as fuels, lubricants, waxes and grease base stocks. Existing conversion processes may not be efficient enough and can release green-house gases into environment. Further, current techniques may be sensitive to quality and quantity of waste plastic feed and they can have an impact to the end product quality. This can be especially important as plastic waste can vary in its consistency due to the varying plastic grades.
It is desirable to provide a reactor system which is sufficiently versatile so as to be able to generate different grades of products without requiring substantial changes to operating conditions or throughput.